Barry Diller

I had the goal that I wanted to count and I had the goal that I was

fascinated by the entertainment business.

I don't like it when people come in to the early stages of a broad general entertainment career and say, I want to run a studio or things like that.

I think whatever your interest is, you just get on the broad path.

whatever door you got to bang to get in there, you get on the broad path and everything else takes care of itself.

You don't have to say, I want to be this or I want to be that.

My observation is that doesn't really work.

What works is if you get lucky enough to get a position that you don't have experience for, that you haven't mastered, and then you just go about doing it.

The sparks you set off naturally impress others and lead.

They drag you to the next step.

You don't have to do much of anything.

And I think when you do too many things, you know, you see people whose naked ambition is so structured and so people who say, well, I need to go out and network.

And I hear that and I think, oh, you fools.

I mean, what are you talking about?

You don't really need to do that.

It's this kind of pro forma thinking.

of the things you should do, the steps you should take.

It really is far more naturalistic than that.

At one point, one of the things of progress in that mailroom environment is you work on an agent's desk as his assistant secretary at that time, but assistant.

I was very lucky that the person, my second time I did it, was for someone who